Literature Brown Bag: Jonathan Milton Rowland

Jonathan Rowland is a Research Fellow and Lecturer in Classical Studies.

Title: The 'Meta-memorials' of Anyte of Tegea
Abstract: This talk will explore one of the many innovations of the 3rd century BCE poet Anyte, among the earliest literary epigrammatists. In many of her funerary epigrams, Anyte uses the inscriptional context of traditional funerary epigram as a backdrop for her own poetic narrative, centered around the grief of those mourning the deceased. The result of this literary strategy is a style of poem I refer to as a 'meta-memorial'. In a meta-memorial, Anyte's epigram is not to be understood as the memorial itself, or inscribed upon it; her poems are adornments of (imagined) monuments and inscriptions.